Furthermore, Pythagoras believed that there existed celestial goodness proportionate to each degree of virtue, and that there is for the souls, different ranks according to the luminous body with which they are clothed. The supreme happiness, according to him, belongs only to the soul which has learned how to recover itself, by its intimate union with the intelligence, whose essence, changing its nature, has become entirely spiritual. It is necessary that this soul be raised to the knowledge of universal truths, and that it should have found, as far as it is possible for it, the Principle and the end of all things. Then having attained to this high degree of perfection, being drawn into this immutable region whose ethereal element is no more subjected to the descending movement of generation, it can be united by its knowledge to the Universal All, and reflect in all its being the ineffable light with which the Being of beings, God Himself, fills unceasingly the Immensity.
Footnotes
[1] Addressé à la Classe de la Langue et de la Littérature françaises, et à celle d’Histoire et de Littérature ancienne de l’Institut impérial de France.
[2] This expression will be explained in the progress of the discourse.
[3] De Dignit. et Increment. Scient., l. ii., c. 13.
[4] Ibid., l. ii., c. 1.
[5] Ibid., l. vi., c. 1.
[6] Plat., Dial. Ion. Aristotle, who was often opposed to Plato, did not dare to be on this point. He agrees that verse alone does not constitute poetry, and that the History of Herodotus, put into verse, would never be other than history.
[7] Ibid.
[8] De Dignit. et Increment. Scient., l. ii., c. 13.